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THE CHRISTIAN 
COLLEGE 



BY 

HERBERT WELCH 

President of Ohio Wesleyan University 

HENRY CHURCHILL KING 

President of Oberlin College 

THOMAS NICHOLSON 

Secretary of the Board of Education of the Methodist Episcopal Church 
With Introduction by 

WILLIAM H. CRAWFORD 

President Allegheny College 




THE METHODIST BOOK CONCERN 

NEW YORK CINCINNATI 






Copyright, 1916, by 
THE METHODIST BOOK CONCERN 



/^ 



AUG 21 1916 
©CI.A437304 



CONTENTS 

chap. page 

Introduction 5 

I. The Ideals and Aims of the Christian 

College 11 

President Herbert Welch, Ohio Wesleyan 
University 

II. The Importance of the Christian Col- 
lege AS A Factor in the Making 
OF America 28 

President Henry Churchill King, Oberlin 
College 

III. The Product of the Christian Col- 
lege IN Men and Movements ^9 

Rev. Thomas Nicholson, Secretary of the 
Board of Education 



INTRODUCTION 

The three chapters which make up 
this Uttle book are papers which were 
specially prepared for the celebration of 
the one hundredth anniversary of the 
founding of Allegheny College. The open- 
ing day of the celebration was given over 
to Christian education. Bishop William 
Fraser McDowell preached in the morn- 
ing and eloquently told the story of Christ 
in education. A Missionary Conference 
was held in the afternoon, at which Bishop 
William Burt presided. The speakers were 
Allegheny alumni from the foreign field — 
Bishop James M. Thoburn, Bishop William 
F. Oldham, the Rev. George S. Miner, 
Miss Laura Temple, and others. In the 
evening the theme was "The Christian 
College — Its Ideals and Aims, Its Product 
in Men and Movements, Its Importance 
as a Factor in the Making of America." 

5 



6 INTRODUCTION 

The men invited to discuss these three 
phases of the theme were President Her- 
bert Welch, of Ohio Wesley an University; 
Dr. Thomas Nicholson, General Secretary 
of the Board of Education of the Method- 
ist Episcopal Church; and President Henry 
Churchill King, of Oberlin College. Pres- 
ident Welch was detained at the last 
moment, but his paper was forwarded. 
The impression made by the addresses 
was powerful and far-reaching. Large num- 
bers who listened went away with a new 
conception of the transcendent importance 
of the Christian college in American life. 

The function of the Christian college 
is to encourage and perpetuate that form 
of higher education in which deep learn- 
ing and fervent piety are forever united. 
In such a college religion will be regarded 
as a necessary factor in education and 
the development of the spiritual life — a 
fundamental part of the educational process. 
It is not enough that the Christian col- 
lege shall teach religion. Religion may 
be taught in such a way as to prejudice 



INTRODUCTION 7 

the student against religion. There are 
a few of us still left who remember, not 
with gratitude either, the barren wastes 
we journeyed through in the formal in- 
struction we received in Butler's Analogy, 
Paley's Evidences, and other studies of a 
similar nature. We may teach all the 
religion we please in our colleges; we may 
ofiFer courses in the Bible, the Old Testa- 
ment and the New, with a course in early 
church history thrown in; we may include 
Christian ethics and philosophy of religion, 
theism and missions, but if we do not do 
more than this we shall fall far short of 
reaching the Christian ideal in education. 
We must come back to this, that it is 
not the intellect of a man which is to be 
educated, nor is it the heart, but both 
heart and intellect. The man is to be 
educated. The one fine and high ideal 
all through college ought to be manhood. 
The age of the student makes this of vital 
importance. The four years in college 
come while the boy is developing into the 
man and the girl into the woman. The 



8 INTRODUCTION 

boy enters college at seventeen or eighteen. 
He graduates at the age of twenty-one or 
twenty-two, when the state regards him 
as a man and gives him the right of fran- 
chise. During these crisal years it is vitally 
and transcendently important that the 
Christian ideal of manhood and woman- 
hood shall be kept constantly before the 
student. It is the function of the Chris- 
tian college to see that this is done. 

My own conviction is that the Christian 
college, call it by whatever name you will, 
was never more necessary than now. With 
secularism at full tide, with the multiplied 
complexities of our modern life reducing 
more and more the time which may be 
given to things eternal, with the gospel 
of service preached in many quarters in 
a way to almost exclude the gospel of 
manhood, with the ozone of moral earnest- 
ness and triumphant moral leadership much 
less in evidence than we could wish, with 
the state universities and some other uni- 
versities giving a considerable portion of 
their elBFort to vocational and professional 



INTRODUCTION 9 

training, with commercialism and the com- 
mercial spirit dominating altogether too 
largely the life of the nation, it is of the 
utmost importance that we give serious 
and earnest attention to that type of 
higher education which will yield largest 
results in moral and spiritual leadership. 

The critics who say that the state will 
take care of education, or that the money 
of the church is needed for missions and 
other benevolences, or that the colleges 
have already had enough money and ought 
to take care of themselves for the future, 
are looking only on the surface. Con- 
structive Christian statesmanship makes it 
necessary that we should look beneath 
the surface. Looking beneath the surface 
we shall find that up to the present time 
no institution has been established which 
will quite take the place of the Christian 
college. We need this type of college for 
the sake of efficient leadership in the 
church, for the sake of the home and 
social life of our people, and for the sake 
of the great cause of education in America. 



10 INTRODUCTION 

If the Christian college shall be true 
to its traditions as described in the fol- 
lowing chapters, and if it shall function as 
a real Christian college, it will, in the 
future as in the past, make tremendously 
rich contributions to the Christian leader- 
ship of this nation and to Christian leader- 
ship in lands beyond the seas. 

William H. Crawford. 
Allegheny College, 
Meadville, Pennsylvania. 



CHAPTER I 

THE IDEALS AND AIMS OF THE 
CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 

President Herbert Welch 

What is a Christian college? Chris- 
tianity is broader than any of its institu- 
tions; in education, as in society and 
politics, it is a pervasive force. The term 
"Christian college" is surely not to be 
limited to those colleges whose name or 
charter or denominational control gives 
outward evidence of a religious motive — 
"by their fruits ye shall know them." 
It is doubtless true that, just as the church 
is the chief pattern and instrument of the 
kingdom of God, so the denominational 
college is the typical form of the Christian 
ideal operating in education. But any 
college founded and conducted for a Chris- 
tian purpose is obviously to be included 

among Christian colleges, whatever its 

11 



12 THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 

formal rejation to a religious body. The 
Christian college, in short, is one whose 
ideals and aims are determined by the 
great conceptions of life which we count 
distinctively Christian. 

The first of such aims is culture. The 
ideal of a liberal education is really a 
Christian ideal, since it is based on the 
Christian conception of personality. It 
has spread far beyond the institutions 
which by title and organization claim to 
represent the Christian Church and the 
Christian cause, but in its origin and 
essence it is Christian. And in this day of 
specialized training the old ideal of a 
liberal education still needs defense. A 
higher education is possible which is ma- 
terialistic in its view both of nature and 
of life; and such a view is clearly inad- 
equate and misleading. Training for occu- 
pations, for example, is by no means to 
be decried. Vocational, technical, profes- 
sional studies, whether in the lower or the 
higher school, may have an intellectual and 
moral as well as a financial value. But 



THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 13 

it is easy just now to be swept away by 
the demand that every study shall be of 
''practical," that is to say, of business 
worth. Vocational training may be mate- 
rialistic, whether it be for the carpenter, 
the engineer, the lawyer, or the preacher. 
If specialization be too close, if aims too 
narrowly utilitarian, we may sacrifice 
breadth and freedom to efficiency — and 
this would be the shame of education even 
in an industrial democracy. 

Or, to take an illustration from a differ- 
ent field, let it be granted that the biologist 
is right in claiming that the perfume and 
beauty of the flower are advertisements of 
need, flaunting signals to bees and butter- 
flies to gather the pollen which will carry 
life to other blossoms; is the only purpose 
of beauty to make possible the perpet- 
uation of itself? Is there no higher meaning 
to the flowers than this? How fearfully 
"practical" we often come to be! We 
complain of the Creator because some 
farm sticks up perpendicular into the air, 
because the rocky hillside will break the 



14 THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 

plow that is driven against it or wash out 
the crops that are sown upon it. As if 
there were no use for any piece of ground 
except to bear our foodstuffs! Beauty 
man needs as well as food, and more. 
Nature must never be interpreted in terms 
merely of yield. Let all the earth be tilled 
and part of man shall starve: he is soul 
as well as stomach. Trees are for more 
than lumber; the sea for more than ships. 
Have the sunsets any efficiency value? 
But have the poppies among the wheat, 
or the silences of a lonely wood, or the 
wild flowers of a stony field no mission 
and worth? The supreme purpose of life 
is not to keep itself going. Why should 
it go at all? Have the poets all been 
mistaken who have fancied that the soul 
was made for beauty, and beauty for 
the soul? Have the philosophers erred 
who have asserted that any ideal of the 
Infinite and Absolute must contain the 
beautiful with the true and the good? Has 
the God been wrong who lavishly made 
flowers before fruit? 



THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 15 

The scientist and the eflSciency expert 
have not exhausted the facts between 
them. God's world is not made that way. 
Man must work to keep ahve, to be sure; 
but the only reasonable justification for 
his keeping alive is that he shall have a 
life worth living — a life that is more than 
mere physical existence. The things which 
make life rich must always and everywhere 
be held more significant than the things 
which make life long. Art, philosophy, 
literature, society — all that tends to the 
appreciation of beauty with the knowledge 
of truth, all that enlarges the circle of 
intellectual interest, that kindles the imag- 
ination, that brings power, breadth and 
balance, is a part of the race's heritage. 
The total personality has its rights; the 
man has a claim to a complete develop- 
ment. But this is a distinctively Christian 
conception; this estimate of personality 
which lies at the base of democracy and 
of culture alike, came from Jesus Christ. 
"Culture" may be used to cover much 
that is vague and inert; but nevertheless 



16 THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 

the tone of campus life ought to be created 
by that ideahsm which belongs to a genuine 
culture, and of this the college, the Chris- 
tian college, is the best exponent. It 
believes in the cultivation of feeling as 
well as reason, heart as well as will, imag- 
ination as well as memory. It must aim 
first not to make the bread-winner but the 
life-winner — not the engineer or the law- 
yer or the preacher, but the man. Curric- 
ulums may change; the very content of 
the term "liberal education" may differ 
widely in the twentieth century from the 
thought of the fifteenth century; the classics 
may be a diminishing, though not a van- 
ishing, power; the newer humanities and 
the natural sciences may gain their right- 
ful place; but all must be fitted into a 
general cultural scheme — a plan to grow 
symmetrical and rounded personalities — if 
the college is in any fair fashion to repre- 
sent the Christian ideal. 

Moreover, this Christian ideal of a full- 
orbed education must include character 
as well as culture. If the entire nature of 



THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 17 

man is the proper subject of education, 
then conscience, loyalty, aspiration, rever- 
ence — all that enters into the moral and 
religious life — must receive adequate recog- 
nition in our educational plan. Moral 
standards must be established, moral in- 
struction must be given, a dynamic must 
be discovered equal to the high task of 
moral victory, and (most weighty and 
most difficult of all) those who are being 
"educated" must somehow be won to ad- 
herence to these standards and be filled 
with this power. 

Our educational literature to-day is alive 
with the emphasis on moral needs. It is 
everywhere being discerned, more clearly 
perhaps than at any time within the last 
hundred years, that an education which 
Ignores the moral nature is fundamentally 
defective. And no educational problem is 
now regarded as more urgent than that 
of the best method of imparting moral 
instruction and of making it effective. 
Public school experiments of great variety 
are being tried; new attention is being 



18 THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 

given in college fraternity councils, in 
State and independent universities, to moral 
problems and their religious solution, for 
it is increasingly admitted that apart from 
the restraints and the inspirations of re- 
ligion our morality is likely to make a 
sorry showing. 

Now, this has from the beginning been 
the contention and the emphasis of the 
Christian college. It has held that char- 
acter is more than all fortune or fame, 
all intellectual or aesthetic development, and 
that the life which has found its springs 
in God through Jesus Christ is at once the 
safest, the sanest, the happiest, and the 
mightiest — in a word, presents the sound- 
est character. It would be a pity of pities 
if now, when others, to some extent be- 
cause of its influence and example, are 
coming to the same position, the Christian 
college should in any degree lose the 
faith which has been its ancient glory. 
No increasing prosperity, no social refine- 
ment, no intellectual superiority, no shame 
of piety, no lust for an easy popularity 



THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 19 

should lure it from the ground on which 
its banners were long ago planted! 

The Christian colleges are by no means 
a unit in their choice of ways to reach the 
desired result. What rules should be made 
concerning the physical and social and 
devotional habits of students, and how 
effective such rules are in character-build- 
ing, are still points of discussion rather than 
of general agreement. But when we go 
below the mechanics to the more vital 
questions involved, we are much nearer 
to unity. For instance, we should probably 
agree that the Christian college should be 
marked by the personal interest of the 
faculty in the students, by a frank ac- 
ceptance of the fact that they must not 
be dealt with simply in masses, but that 
individually their intellectual and their 
moral problems as well are the business of 
college officers and teachers. Even the 
dreaded word "paternalism," even the im- 
portance of avoiding either mental or 
religious coddling, must not frighten us 
from a genuine and deep and personal 



20 THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 

concern, and an endeavor to express that 
concern in personal helpfulness. 

Again, in a Christian college one has a 
right to look for a Christian background 
to the teaching of the course. Not that 
every lesson is to have a moral appended, 
not that every lecture is to be turned into 
a preachment, but that behind science and 
history and literature and philosophy should 
be felt the throbbing of a Christian faith. 

Again, in a Christian college, I take it, 
there should be a spirit of humility and 
reverence which will respect the crudest 
forms of faith, which will take no joy in 
disturbing cherished beliefs, however blun- 
dering, but, while seeking to create new 
and more intelligent forms, will always 
count the substance greater than the form. 

Once more: the Christian college will 
find a place for evangelism; that is, for 
the direct effort, in which students and 
faculty may unite to make Christians 
out of non-Christians, and (not less urgent) 
to render real and controlling the religion 
of many who are nominally, superficially. 



THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 21 

mechanically Christian. The methods of 
college evangelism may not be those of 
the rescue mission; the age, the temper, 
the environment, the peculiar needs of 
those concerned must all be taken into 
account. But there is no apology needed 
for college campaigns against sin, whether 
that sin be individual or social, internal or 
external, respectable or criminal; and cam- 
paigns for righteousness — righteousness of 
speech, of act, and of collective life, right- 
eousness stalwart, militant, enthusiastic, 
righteousness expressing itself in worship, 
in study, in sport. To win its students 
from sin to righteousness is, when every- 
thing has been said, the highest achieve- 
ment of the Christian college. 

Of course all this implies a Christian 
faculty. More immediately than the trus- 
tees, more continuously than the students, 
the instructors give tone to the college 
life. A president's most delicate and most 
important duty is the selection of his 
faculty. Unless the type of character 
which the college desires in the students 



22 THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 

is well represented in the faculty, the 
effort is hampered, if not altogether de- 
feated. Unless something of the Christian 
sacrificial spirit be found in the faculty, 
how can professionalism be avoided and 
the students fail to be infected with the 
notion that a place and a salary and a 
chance to do congenial work are the sole 
end of life? A Christian college without 
a Christian faculty is unthinkable; but a 
really Christian faculty will inevitably build 
a school for Christian character. 

One other word should be plainly uttered, 
though it may seem to be involved in 
the last — ^I mean the word service. The 
Christian character which does not find 
expression in service is scarcely worthy of 
the name. Besides promoting that almost 
instinctive love of native land which we 
call patriotism, and that loyalty to Alma 
Mater which has been nicknamed "matriot- 
ism," the college should foster an inter- 
nationalism like that of Jesus Christ, a 
love of man overflowing all barriers of 
social distinction, color, nationality, and a 



THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 23 

love for men (to many more difficult of 
attainment than the love of man) which 
shall draw the lover straight through the 
open door of service. Education for its 
own sake is as bad as art for art's sake; 
but culture held in trust to empower one 
better to serve one's fellow men, the wise 
for the ignorant, the strong for the weak — 
this is an aim than which none can be 
higher. To believe in personal freedom and 
responsibility, in immortality, in brother- 
hood, in Christ, so profoundly that one 
can despise mere material rewards and be- 
come the unpaid, because unpayable, serv- 
ant of men — this is to be a fit alumnus 
of a Christian college. The service which 
can be fully paid for is hardly worth its 
wages. But the trained and consecrated 
man will find channels, in church or state 
or trade, through which to convey some 
gift that is beyond all price. Lincoln could 
never be paid in money by the American 
people. The world will never, can never, 
recompense in any fullness its great sol- 
diers, its great artists, its great preachers. 



24 THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 

its great inventors. The big financial re- 
wards often miss those who most deserve 
them, but who, after all, do not most covet 
them. Many of the graduates of the 
Christian college are likely to go into the 
altruistic professions of teaching, the min- 
istry, and the like. They may not make 
their college rich, but they may help to 
make it glorious. 

The relation of the college to service 
is threefold: it may help the student dis- 
cover his field of service; it may inculcate 
or impart the spirit of service; and it may 
train for service. The college course, if 
it be wisely proportioned, will give at least 
a glimpse into many fields of interest and 
activity. It ought to bring the student 
to a genuine self -disco very. Perhaps the 
largest assistance it can render in the 
way of vocational guidance is to enable 
him, by contact with many forms of 
knowledge and by discussion of many 
forms of work, to find out the particular 
thing for which he was made. And it 
should so interpret all occupations in terms 



THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 25 

of human need that he shall be able to 
see that farmer and manufacturer and 
physician and teacher and author and 
artist — every man who is following a legit- 
imate business, is the servant of his brother, 
is filling a useful place in the human 
family, and may therefore make his call- 
ing holy. His prevailing purpose, then, in 
his daily toil may be not to make a living 
merely, but to make a life. His occupation 
becomes the sacrifice which he lays upon 
the altar of humanity; his labor is dig- 
nified and sanctified and purified. 

This will come to pass if he has caught 
the spirit of service — if in the choice of 
his occupation and the pursuit of his occu- 
pation, he has learned that '*it is more 
blessed to give than to receive"; if as he 
faces the world he asks, not "What can I 
get from you.^" but "What can I give to 
you.^" The natural generosity and daring 
of youth need to be transformed into a 
steadfast purpose that will control the 
life, that will make work more important 
than wages, and service synonymous with 



26 THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 

success. If in the golden years the Chris- 
tian college cannot inspire its students 
with this passion for the investment of life 
where it will be most productive for man 
and for God, vain has its teaching been! 

But the horses of the sun need always 
to be harnessed and trained. The passion 
for service may be futile if it be not wisely 
guided and carefully prepared for effective- 
ness. What the world needs to-day is 
good will, to be sure, but good will joined 
with intelligence and efficiency. Never 
were our moral and political problems more 
complicated. Never in our international 
relations had we greater need of sagacity, 
to get the Golden Rule put into operation. 
Never were prophets so precious — men who 
have surveyed the past and studied its im- 
plications, but men also of vision, of far- 
sighted statesmanship, who are able to apply 
Christian principles to the difficult situations 
of the times, men with the ability to be 
leaders and the will to be servants. 

Where shall we find such men, balanced 
and powerful and true, consecrated to the 



THE CHRISTIAJN^ COLLEGE 27 

highest ideals and trained for the largest 
service, if not in those colleges where 
Jesus Christ is honored as King and loved 
as Comrade, and where in his name the 
treasures of learning are opened for the 
enrichment of his brothers? The world 
needs the man who knows, the man who 
loves, the man who can do, that its prob- 
lems may be solved, its wrongs righted, 
its happiness fulfilled. The church for its 
great advance movements in theology, in 
missionary expansion, in evangelism, re- 
form, and social service, has a right to 
look to the Christian college for its chief 
supply. But whether in ofiicial station 
or in obscurity, in professional or in business 
life, the Christian college would fain see 
its sons and daughters standing everywhere 
in the spirit of Him who said, "I am 
among you as one that serveth." They 
are its pride. To them, broadened and 
informed by their culture, clean and strong 
in their character, devoted in their service. 
Alma Mater will surely say, "Well done! 
Hail, and godspeed!" 



CHAPTER II 

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE CHRIS- 
TIAN COLLEGE AS A FACTOR IN 
THE MAKING OF AMERICA 

President Henry Churchill King 



Into the later years of the Christian 
colleges of America have come the move- 
ments of a new world of thought, reflecting 
itself externally in a great increase of sub- 
jects and courses offered, in the elective 
system, and in the laboratory and seminar 
methods. In the inner life of the college 
the new world of thought has meant a 
definite and conscious facing, in the open- 
minded spirit of the first beatitude, of 
the facts of natural science and evolution; 
of the historical spirit, with its application 
in comparative religion and the historical 

28 



THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 29 

criticism of the Scriptures; of the new 
psychology; of the new science of sociology, 
and of newer developments in philosophy 
and theology — and all these with their 
educational, ethical, social, and religious 
applications. The last twenty-five years 
have been revolutionary to a degree seldom 
true in the history of the race — a peculiarly 
transition time in all spheres of thought 
and ideals. But I believe it can be truth- 
fully said that for the best Christian col- 
leges, certainly, the transition has been 
made, not indeed without change, but 
without breach with the very best in their 
past, and without sacrifice of truth, of 
ethical ideals, or of religious faith. The 
scientific spirit and its evolutionary out- 
look, the historical spirit with its recog- 
nition of the historical interpretation of 
the Bibje, and of the religious history of the 
race; the social consciousness with its new 
ethical and social insistence in civic and 
religious life; and philosophical and theolog- 
ical interest and emphasis are all at home 
in the best Christian colleges. For many 



30 THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 

of these things, indeed, our past naturally 
prepared us. Thus the departments of 
theology are not only at peace, but, with 
clearing thought, have been increasingly in 
hearty cooperation with the departments of 
the sciences, of history, of sociology, and 
of philosophy, not because the theological 
is dominating the others, but because all 
desire the truth and are ready to follow 
it to its fullest consequences, taking into 
account the full breadth of the nature of 
men and the long sweep of human history. 
We live in a larger, more unified, more 
evolving, more law-abiding world than that 
in which our fathers seemed to live; but 
we find in all this not less but greater 
reason for faith in God and in our possi- 
bilities of sharing in his purposes. This 
outcome, already largely achieved at our 
best Christian centers, and increasingly to 
be achieved in all our Christian colleges, 
is one of the most important points at which 
the Christian college is proving now a 
factor in the making of a better America. 
We have a right to rejoice in this out- 



THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 31 

come of a positive and rejoicing Christian 
faith, facing serenely the modern age. 

II 

The material inheritance of the earlier 
years of our Christian colleges was not 
large, but the ideal inheritance has been 
great indeed. The later years have very 
largely increased the material inheritance 
of the Christian colleges, and they have 
had their own manifest contribution upon 
the ideal side of the life of the colleges. 
First of all, the Christian colleges have 
stood for something — for positives, not 
negatives. They have had convictions and 
genuine individuality. And this element 
in the inheritance of the Christian college 
demands men with courage to be them- 
selves, to stand against the merely con- 
ventional. Most men are pitiful cowards in 
the face of convention, even when con- 
vention is plainly foolish or wrong. There 
are many weak and timid souls who dread 
nothing so much as to seem peculiar, and 
think the whole line of progress lies in 



32 THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 

becoming just like all the rest. Doubtless 
it is not pleasant to seem peculiar, and 
peculiarity is not to be sought for its own 
sake. But if peculiarity follows from 
fidelity to one's own vision and task, it 
cannot be scouted, without scouting all 
duty at the same time. Christian colleges 
must be willing to sacrifice something for 
their Christian principles. And as a whole 
there can be no doubt that they have 
stood for the all-around education of the 
entire man. They have stood for an 
education looking preeminently for service. 
They have stood for an education that 
was national and world-wide in its out- 
look. And in all this they have profoundly 
influenced the life of our time. They have 
been furnishing good leaven for the na- 
tional life, men and women who are to 
be in very truth the "salt of the earth," 
living seed of the great oncoming kingdom 

of God. 

Ill 

The inheritance of the Christian college 
too gives it the right to stand in the broad- 



THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 33 

est and most untrammeled way for the 
great historic ideals of the race; for truth, 
for character, for Christ, for the church. 
For the truth, for we can be fearless in 
the conviction of its unity; for character, 
as the supreme interest in Hfe; for Christ, 
as the supreme revelation, both of man 
and of God; for the church, as the one 
great world organization for ideal ends. 
The Christian college is bound to no 
narrow interpretation at any of these 
points, but can throw itself with all its 
power into fellowship with the ideal forces 
everywhere. As a persistent witness to 
these great historic ideals of the race, and 
as an institution peculiarly designed to 
train men and women into these great 
historic ideals, the Christian college has 
proved its importance as a factor in the 
making of America. 

This means, in turn, that Christian col- 
leges have, if they will but use it, a price- 
less, double inheritance: on the one hand, 
the right to recognize the legitimate and 
inevitable place of the moral and religious 



34 THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 

in education — not apologetically, but avow- 
edly and earnestly, as the only normal 
and logical thing — a position increasingly 
taken by the thoughtful everywhere to- 
day, and a position that the whole world 
situation emphasizes anew; on the other 
hand, freedom to think within the broadest 
Christian lines. There can be no doubt 
that, with entire loyalty to denominational 
connections, where these exist, the Chris- 
tian college has come increasingly to stand 
on a Christian basis broader than any one 
denomination. Open-minded discussion has 
tended more and more to be a prime means; 
denominational tests have been less and 
less narrowly applied; the door to the 
church has increasingly been regarded as 
wide as the door to the kingdom of heaven; 
heresy-hunting has declined, and the prime 
emphasis has been laid upon a Christlike 
love as the one all-embracing virtue in 
God or man. The whole work of the 
Christian college has more and more been 
regarded as a trust to each generation in 
turn, as guided by the living Spirit of God. 



THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 35 

There has been less and less attempt, 
therefore, to tie the hands of successors. 
Paul's principle, laid down to Timothy, has 
more and more ruled: "The same commit 
thou to faithful men, who shall be able 
to teach others also." To this position 
the Christian college could but come, since 
both the fathers and their successors be- 
lieved in a living God. In this ability to 
couple an earnest moral and religious em- 
phasis in education with freedom to think 
within the broadest Christian lines, the 
college has once more proved itself a 
large factor in the making of the best in 
American life. 

And no less certainly does the inheritance 
of the colleges, and through them the 
nation, call to a constantly truer democracy 
and to a new Puritanism. 



IV 

The Christian college has stood, on the 
whole, with marked persistence against 
the aristocracy of sex, of color, of wealth. 



36 THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 

and of the exclusive clique of every order 
and it cannot here go backward. It is 
called to draw more fully than they have 
ever yet been drawn the inferences from 
Christ's principle of every man as a child 
of God. That will ultimately mean social 
readjustments more far-reaching and sig- 
nificant even than the abolition of slavery. 
The principle here involved is that which 
is to guide in the whole progress of the 
race. A genuinely Christian democracy men 
have never yet seen. But I speak my 
sober conviction when I say that I do not 
know where more freely than in an avowedly 
and aggressively Christian college a man 
could stand for that dawning Christian 
democracy when we shall have fully awak- 
ened to the self-stultification of our placid 
assumption that whole classes of men 
should exist primarily for our greater com- 
fort or ease. The Christian college needs 
to be jealously on its guard that it does 
not in any way become identified with 
those who demand unearned privileges. 
Its constant need of money makes it 



THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 37 

liable to this temptation, and it must 
resist it with all its might, for the Chris- 
tian college must be standing unmistakably 
for a genuinely Christian democracy in 
the face of the entire life of the nation. 
Here, again, it is an important factor, 
and must be a still more important factor 
in the making of America. 

V 

Both the later and earlier inheritance 
of the Christian colleges call them also 
to a new Puritanism} We should be able 
to do justice now to our national inher- 
itance in Puritanism. We should be able 
to see both its strength and its weakness, 
and add to the great positives of the Puri- 
tan spirit — so well shown in the earlier 
spirit of the Christian college — the positives 
of the social consciousness of the modern 
world. And face to face with the enor- 
mous material development of the modern 



1 In this discussion of a new Puritanism, I have ventured to reproduce 
in substance a small part of the chapter on that subject in my The Moral 
and Religious Challenge of Our Times. 



38 THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 

world and its dangers for the ideal life, 
we shall feel again the stern call to such 
simple living and such self-discipline as the 
Puritan could bear. The time for this 
has not gone. We shall not make again 
the mistake of asceticism, of regarding 
self-denial as an end in itself, but we 
shall take on understandingly and whole- 
heartedly all that self -discipline that is 
valuable for the individual himself, as 
physical, mental, and moral hygiene; all 
that self-discipline that, though the indi- 
vidual himself may not feel its need, is 
fairly demanded by the good of the whole 
community; and all the self -discipline that 
is further involved in the full subordination 
of all the lesser goods to the greater, and 
in the clear recognition that a man is 
made for heroic service, and cannot himself 
be largely and finally satisfied in passive 
self-indulgence. Man is made on too 
large a plan for him to rest in that. From 
all these various points of view we shall 
hear again the challenge of the ancient 
voice: "Take thy part in suffering hard- 



THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 39 

ship as a good soldier of Christ Jesus." 
And this for three reasons. 

In the first place, all efficiency — of which 
we are talking much in these days — goes 
back finally to personal efficiency, and 
there are many things to indicate that it 
is still true that the individual is nowhere 
counting to his full capacity. Probably 
most of us, by the practice of a more 
scientific and earnestly moral self-control, 
have a distinctly higher type of life and a 
larger and finer service within our reach. 
This is what we may all well covet for 
the college men and women of our day. 
This was what the fathers were seeking 
in their early Puritanical insistencies. From 
this point of view alone I cannot doubt 
that the common stand of the Methodist 
Church against liquor and tobacco has been 
thoroughly justified. As simply an ab- 
normal use of the nervous system, it is 
difficult to believe that these intoxicant 
and narcotic habits are to hold the future; 
and they will do so the less, the more 
insistent becomes the scientific demand 



40 THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 

for avoidance of waste — of money, of time, 
of nerve, of energy, of high quality of 
work. For personal efficiency, then, first 
of all, there must be this new Puritanism. 

In the second place, if the community 
has the right to demand from its locomotive 
engineers, for the greater protection and 
more efficient service of the public, total 
abstinence, then it can hardly be denied 
that it has a like right to demand from its 
great financial, political, and social engineers 
a similar freedom from befuddling condi- 
tions. The fabric of national life is a 
seamless robe. The connections are mar- 
velously close and are becoming more so 
with every year. The community may 
suffer less immediately and obviously by 
the selfish intemperance of financial or 
educational magnates than by the be- 
fuddled brains of the locomotive engineer, 
but in the end the danger is likely to be 
greater. The best brains and the most 
unselfish purposes are none too good for 
the tasks which confront the modern state. 
And it is one of the standing disgraces of 



THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 41 

the educational world at many points that 
in the discernment of the personal need 
of temperance it should not only have 
been in general no leader, but should have 
lagged far behind great industrial cor- 
porations. Because of the community trust, 
therefore, in the second place, a new 
Puritanism is to be urged. 

In the third place, if it belongs to the 
college to fit for living — to furnish in pe- 
culiar degree those who are to be the 
social leaven of the nation and the world 
— then the college may least of all forget 
the full meaning of life, of man, and of 
man's heroic mold. And they must awaken 
the deepest and the best in young men 
and women, and enable them to respond 
with joy to that heroic service for which, 
after all, human nature craves. It is a 
mean and petty education in which deep 
calls not unto deep. And the standards 
of self-indulgence with which some college 
communities seem content are a disgrace 
to the name of education, to say nothing 
of religion. The simple fact is that there 



42 THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 

is still a widespread willingness to condone 
and defend college dissipation and lawless- 
ness that must be regarded as thoroughly 
illogical and out of date. The true situa- 
tion is this: in its college and university 
students the nation sets large numbers 
free from productive labor, for the high 
and special privilege of long training for 
leadership. Every obligation of honor binds 
these to be not less, but more, scrupulously 
law-abiding and self-controlled than others. 
Special privileges in the world's democracy 
have just one possible justification — a corre- 
spondingly great special fidelity and special 
service. If the teachers or students of 
Christian colleges ever forget this, they 
stultify themselves and their whole better 
inheritance. This is not an exalted stand- 
ard, but the minimum of obligation. In 
standing thus for the great positives of 
the Puritan spirit — ^for the new Puritan- 
ism — the Christian colleges are proving a 
real factor in the making of America, and 
should prove a still greater factor in the 
years just ahead. 



THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 43 

VI 

And it is especially true that no supposed 
heights of moral enthusiasm and aims 
may excuse a college from proving to be 
rigorously just what it pretends to be — 
an educational institution, making teach- 
ing and study its main business. It is 
quite true that the intellectual is not the 
only nor the chief end in education. And 
we are not to confuse — as some seem to 
do — the fact that courses of study ought 
rightly to take the largest part of the 
time of a college student, with the mis- 
taken inference that they constitute, there- 
fore, the end and aim of college education. 
They are a very important means, and 
take the largest part of the time; but they 
are not, in themselves, end and aim. The 
end of education is preparation for living. 
We know to live, not live to know. But 
nevertheless study must make the largest 
demand on the student's time; and he 
cannot meet his primary obligation as a 
student without meeting this demand. He 
is to live up to his label — student. And we 



44 THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 

may all well covet for the college men and 
women ability to think; to think clearly, 
rigorously, and exhaustively. 

And the college must do what it pretends 
to do — it must teach, and teach well. It 
must honestly furnish what it pretends to 
furnish. It may not expatiate on the 
college's preparation for life, and have 
at the same time no real assurance that 
it is reaching its goal, no clear discern- 
ment of the laws of life, and no manifest 
power to stir the desire and gird the will 
of men for obedience to these laws. Col- 
lege men and women in particular must 
make sure that they 

Begin — continue — close the work 
For which they draw the wage. 

There is always an element of treachery 
somewhere in failure to do honest, square 
work. It is intolerable in any education. 
It is most of all intolerable in Christian 
education. For to try to cover with the 
word "Christian" slovenly work is to reject 
Christ's fundamental demand for absolute 



THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 45 

integrity, in the pretended name of Christ. 
The Christian college has a permanent 
obhgation here that it must never evade 
if it is to prove the factor it ought to be 
in the making of America. 

Thus the task of the Christian college 
of to-day is an inherited task, with peculiar 
obligations, because we stand in just this 
line of descent and no other. For our 
individual task is never an isolated frag- 
ment. It partakes largely of our past. 

And yet our task is ours, and not that 
of our fathers. It is easy to see that, even 
when they tried narrowly to interpret the 
will of God, they could not direct the 
movement to these ends but were swept 
on irresistibly to the far larger ends of the 
providence of God. Doubtless it will be 
so with us also. We may attempt — and 
we must attempt — to define to ourselves 
as precisely as possible the present needed 
applications of the will of God. But God 
will bring to us larger possibilities than 
any of those of which we have dreamed. 

I have tried thus to indicate some of the 



46 THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 

applications to which it seems to me the 
will of God for the college now points. 
But I would not if I could confine the 
Christian college to those insights and 
tasks. We are often bidden to follow the 
fathers. But in the sense in which the 
advice is meant, no one of us who would 
be true can follow the fathers. For we can- 
not truly follow the fathers, by saying 
what the fathers said, or doing what the 
fathers did, but only by evincing a like 
spirit, by striving to meet as open-mindedly, 
as earnestly, as loyally, and as fearlessly 
as they met the problems of their time, 
those of our own. 

And the later college past also brings 
to Christian educators everywhere its chal- 
lenge — the challenge of a revolutionary 
and transition period that has called pre- 
eminently for discrimination — for proving 
all things, and holding fast to the good, 
and for pressing on continually for that 
larger light that God certainly has for the 
diligent seekers after truth, and for using 
that light for still greater service. The 



THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 47 

difficult transition for faith and moral 
ideals is, for very many, still to be made. 
May it be given to the college educators 
of to-day, whether with serenity or by 
struggle, to make the transition for them- 
selves and to give deep help here to others 
also. For the world never needed more 
than to-day the educator of religious vision 
and conviction, who "would not make his 
judgment blind," who can fuse the 
prophet's sense of the spiritual world with 
the scientific spirit and the social con- 
sciousness of the modern age. 

Thus the lesson of the history of the 
Christian college, as I see it, is nowhere 
servile imitation, but truth to oneself, 
loyalty to conviction, the earnest pursuit 
of the truth, the obligation of growth, 
and the constantly expanding applications 
of a genuinely Christian love in all the 
social, national, and international relations 
of our time. For we shall not long hold 
on to a Christian standard in our individual 
relations which we are not rigorously and 
with all our souls ready to apply in the 



48 THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 

relations of larger groups and in the rela- 
tions of nation to nation. If we Christian 
educators, therefore, are to be true to 
our birthright, we must believe in a living 
God, with whom we have growingly to do. 
We think perhaps that we can believe 
that God was with Amos and Isaiah, with 
John and Paul, with Augustine and Luther 
and Wesley, and Finney; but all this will 
not avail. Can we believe he is with us 
and with those about us.^^ 

Others have labored, and we are entered 
into their labor. May we be worthy of 
our heritage and be able to glory, not 
only in the importance that the Christian 
college has had as a factor in the making 
of America, but by our vitality insure 
its still greater importance in the years 
to come. 



CHAPTER III 

THE PRODUCT OF THE CHRISTIAN 

COLLEGE IN MEN AND 

MOVEMENTS 

Secretary Thomas Nicholson 

The power of a nation, the influence 
of a community, depends not upon the 
number but upon the quahty of its men. 
Litchfield County is a group of hills and 
vales in northwestern Connecticut. It is 
not much larger than the ranch of many 
a cattle king in New Mexico or Texas, 
for it is only thirty-three miles long and 
twenty-seven miles wide; but the influences 
for good which have radiated from that 
httle Greece are immeasurable. The county 
furnished the American Revolution with 
men like Ethan Allen and Seth Warner, 
gave the Civil War movement Harriet 
Beecher Stowe and John Brown; gave 



50 THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 

many colleges their presidents, among them 
Finney to Oberlin, Day to Yale, Babcock 
to Colby, and Sturtevant to Illinois. It 
produced Professors N. W. Taylor for 
Yale, Ebenezer Porter for Andover, and 
William Thompson for Hartford. It gave 
the American pulpit Horace Bushnell, 
Henry Ward Beecher, John Pierpont, and 
numerous others of nation-wide fame. The 
first law school in America was there 
opened, and it sent out many of the most 
prominent statesmen and lawyers of the 
last century. In 1831 the Vice-President 
of the United States and one eighth of 
the United States senators were either born 
or educated in that county, and in 1850 
one seventh of all the senators had been 
educated within its confines. 

In the parsonage at Torringford, in this 
same Litchfield County, Samuel J. Mills 
was born. He was the central figure in 
the famous Haystack Prayer Meeting, and 
the spot in a field on his father's farm 
where young Mills dedicated his life to 
God and to the cause of foreign missions 



THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 51 

has been called "The Birthplace of Amer- 
ican Foreign Missions," for it was Mills 
who started the influences which led to 
the formation of the American Board of 
Commissioners for Foreign Missions and 
who enlisted men like Adoniram Judson 
in the cause. Volumes could not ad- 
equately tell the story of the gracious 
influences which have reached the world 
from those Litchfield County hillsides. 

Our colleges, where their spiritual life 
is sound and where their ideals are correct, 
are just such reservoirs of power. The 
wonderful history of Litchfield County 
could be paralleled by the story of the 
output of more than one small college. 
In fact, it was Williams and Yale, Dart- 
mouth and Wesleyan, Harvard and Am- 
herst which trained these Litchfield County 
boys. It was the colleges of New England 
which made this Litchfield County history 
possible. 

In recent years college men have shown 
great ingenuity in the invention of methods 
for discovering and exhibiting the value of 



52 THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 

these institutions to the republic. It is 
difficult to present anything new. Each 
new investigation, however, makes it more 
certain that the American college, which 
at first was chiefly concerned with the 
training of ministers, has rapidly become 
an agency for the training of citizens in 
every walk of life. It is our most efficient 
agency for the training of those men of 
broad vision, of cultivated powers, of 
judicial temper, and of symmetrical man- 
hood who furnish our best and noblest 
leadership; who furnish the inspiration and 
form the directorate of the greatest civil, 
philanthropic, and religious movements of 
modern times. 

We have been told for generations that 
it has trained a very large percentage of 
our noblest clergymen in all denominations, 
but its contribution to the churches in an 
intelligent laity is as great as its gift of 
clergymen. It has also given an ever- 
increasing percentage of our most high- 
minded statesmen, our best authors, our 
most distinguished physicians and lawyers, 



THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 53 

and by far the largest percentage of our 
most conspicuous educators. The American 
college represents the enlarged and enlarg- 
ing intellectual life of the American people. 
We are a republic. We believe that the 
best government rests on the people, not 
on a limited aristocracy; on persons, not 
on property; on the free development of 
public opinion, not on authority. The 
public happiness and the public welfare 
are secured when the masses of mankind 
awaken, get knowledge, and assume the 
care of their own interests. Political action 
has never been so constant and unwaver- 
ing as when it has resulted from a feeling 
and a principle diffused through society. 
The leaders of the American Revolution 
came from the masses, not from the classes. 
So with the French Revolution. This is 
strikingly illustrated in such a field as 
art, where one might least expect to find 
an illustration. In Athens the arts were 
carried to perfection when "the fierce 
democracy" was in the ascendant. The 
temple of Minerva and the works of 



54 THE CHRISTIAlSr COLLEGE 

Phidias were planned and perfected to 
please the common people. When Greece 
yielded to tyrants and dictators, her genius 
for excellence in art expired. When, after 
long eclipse, the arts again burst into a 
splendid existence, it was under popular 
influence. It was so in the Middle Ages. 
During the rough contests and feudal 
tyrannies of that period religion opened 
in the church an asylum for the masses, 
and it was the sons of the common people 
who made the churches the great art 
galleries of the world. Giotto, the wool- 
worker's apprentice, made art the vehicle 
of the most powerful dramatic story-telling 
painting has ever known. Moved by an 
infinite sympathy with the common people, 
the souls of Perugino and Raphael dipped 
their pencils in living colors and decorated 
the churches where men adored the living 
God with those divine conceptions of beau- 
tiful forms which made them famous. In 
a later age art passed under the control 
of the wealthy. It gave itself to the adorn- 
ment of the palaces of the rich nobles. 



THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 55 

Instead of the brilliant works which ap- 
pealed to the people, the banqueting halls 
came to be covered with grotesque forms 
such as float before the imagination when 
excited and bewildered by sensual in- 
dulgence. Instead of Holy Families, the 
enduring faith of martyrs, and the blessed 
fellowships of evangelical love, we behold 
the motley groups of fawns and satyrs, 
pictures of voluptuous beauty and all 
the forms of licentiousness. Humanity 
frowned on this desecration of art, and 
painting lost its greatness. If our arts, 
our literature, our statesmanship, are to 
have a brilliant history, the inspiration 
must spring from the vigor of our com- 
mon people. Genius will not long thrive 
on the flattery of the personal humors of 
patrons or the decoration of gilded palaces. 
The glory of America is preeminently 
her common people, and the American 
college has been the chief factor in arous- 
ing, inspiring, and making them intelli- 
gently efiicient. We remember George 
William Curtis' stirring words on the lead- 



56 THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 

ership of educated men. He said: ''The 
great political contest in England inspired 
by the Reformation was directed by uni- 
versity men. John Pym in the Commons, 
John Hampden in the field, John Milton 
in the Cabinet — three Johns and all of 
them well-beloved disciples of liberty — 
with the grim Oliver himself purging Eng- 
land of royal despotism and 'avenging the 
slaughtered saints on Alpine mountains 
cold,' were all of them children of Oxford 
and Cambridge. In the next century, 
like a dawn lurid but bright, the French 
Revolution broke upon the world. But 
the only hope of a wise direction of the 
elemental forces that upheaved France 
vanished when the educated leadership 
lost control, and Marat became the genius 
and the type of the Revolution." 

We know what kept England from the 
extravagances of the same burning pas- 
sions. Was it not Burke and Chatham 
on the one hand, and on the other that 
group of ever-to-be-remembered Oxford 
scholars, John and Charles Wesley, George 



THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 57 

Whitefield, and the leaders of early Method- 
ism? It was men of this spirit and lineage 
who came to America and founded her 
colleges almost concurrently with her civ- 
ilization. Dr. Thwing says that "among 
the twenty-one thousand people who came 
to New England between 1620 and 1640 
and among their descendants for the 
following fifty years, there were as many 
college graduates as could be found in 
any population of similar size in the 
mother country. At one time in Massa- 
chusetts and Connecticut every group of 
two hundred and fifty people had one 
graduate of old Cambridge. In addition 
to the Cambridge graduates, there were 
also several from Oxford." These colonists 
founded and fostered the early American 
colleges, and their graduates became the 
apostles of the liberties of the common 
people. Consequently, Mr. Curtis is able 
to continue: "It was a son of Harvard, 
James Otis, who proposed the assembly 
of an American Congress without asking 
the king's leave. It was a son of Yale, 



58 THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 

John Morin Scott, who declared that if 
taxation without representation were to be 
enforced, the colonies ought to separate 
from England. It was a group of New 
York scholars — ^John Jay and Scott and 
the Livingstones — which spoke for the col- 
ony in response to the Boston Port Bill 
and proposed the Continental Congress. 
It was a New England scholar in that 
Congress whom Rufus Choate declared to 
be the distinctive and comprehensive orator 
of the Revolution — ^John Adams, who, urg- 
ing every argument, touching every stop 
of passion, pride, tenderness, interest, con- 
science, and lofty indignation, swept up 
his country as into a chariot of fire and 
soared to independence." 

It is not strange, therefore, that the col- 
lege man should have been the leader in 
creating that gem of our American civiliza- 
tion, the American public school system. 
The world knows the work of Horace 
Mann, a graduate of Brown University 
and the founder of Antioch College. If 
we are thinking of the elegant buildings 



THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 59 

and rich endowments of the Brown Uni- 
versity of to-day, let us remember that 
in his day the name was changed from the 
College of Rhode Island to that of Brown 
University by the gift of five thousand 
dollars from Nicholas Brown. The educa- 
tional system of Indiana is the product 
of the influence of Caleb Mills, a professor 
in Wabash College; that of South Dakota 
chiefly owes its origin to General Beadle, 
a graduate of Michigan University when 
it was a small college, and these were but 
types of the pioneers of the West. 

The contribution of the college to the 
public and high schools in the way of 
trained and competent teachers is remark- 
able. A study of the alumni record of 
Ohio Wesleyan University for 1910 showed 
twenty-one presidents and deans of univer- 
sities and colleges, one hundred and sixty- 
eight professors and instructors, eighty- 
five superintendents of public schools, one 
hundred and one principals of high schools, 
and three hundred and sixty teachers in 
the graded high schools — a total of seven 



60 THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 

hundred and thirty-five. De Pauw Uni- 
versity has had twenty-five thousand men 
and women for a part of or all of the 
college course. One third of them have 
entered some branch of the teaching pro- 
fession. Here is the record of a small 
western college, showing that eighty-one 
per cent of its graduates have been teachers 
in our schools for a longer or shorter 
period. These graduates of colleges have 
founded other colleges in the newer terri- 
tory. Alumni of Oberlin founded Olivet 
and Benzonia in Michigan and Grinnell in 
Iowa. Men of Wesleyan founded and 
fostered Northwestern. Such men and 
such institutions have spread light and 
knowledge among the common people. 
They have kept the Commonwealth demo- 
cratic, for the records show that approx- 
imately two thirds of all the men who 
have been students in our American col- 
leges have been the children of comparative 
poverty. 

The democratic influence of such a force 
is seen in a statement of Edward A. Steiner 



THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 61 

regarding Russia. He tells the romance of 
his trip through Russia as a runaway boy, 
of his visit to Count Tolstoy, and how his 
influence made him a Christian. In his 
Immigrant Tide he discusses the Russian 
people and predicts that when the Slav 
comes to himself he will produce one of 
the greatest civilizations of the ages. But 
he points out the fact that up to this time 
the Slav has developed no compact middle 
class. There are the so-called "masses" 
at the bottom. They are burdened with 
taxes; they are kept in ignorance; they 
are hewers of wood and drawers of water 
that the upper fifth may enjoy music 
and art, poetry and literature, and the 
finer things of civilization. Above is the 
aristocracy, with all its privileges and 
immunities. But he says their middle- 
class people, their bankers and their shop- 
keepers are Jews and Italians, Greeks and 
Englishmen, men from foreign lands, and 
he further avers that the Slav never will 
come to his best until he bridges the age- 
long chasm between the masses and the 



62 THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 

classes and develops this compact middle 
class. 

Now, what Dr. Steiner points out as the 
outstanding weakness of Slav civilization 
has been the overmastering greatness of 
our American civilization. We have seen 
the man from the tanyards become the 
leader of our victorious armies. It was 
Allegheny College which trained William 
McKinley, the boy from the ranks of the 
common people, to be the beloved Pres- 
ident of the republic. It was this same 
institution that trained James M. Thoburn, 
the farmer's boy, and William F. Oldham, 
the engineer's son, to be the mighty strat- 
egists of modern missions. Our greatest 
leaders have been developed from this 
middle class. 

Above every other force working to dis- 
cover and develop leadership has been 
the college, and preeminently the small 
college. How often have we been told 
that every chief justice of the United 
States has been a college graduate, except 
John Marshall, and that he was a student 



THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 63 

at William and Mary until the outbreak 
of the Revolution took him to the war? 
How often have we held that the great 
leaders of our public life have come from 
our college halls? Pick up the alumni 
record of any one of them and you will 
find the same story. Here is one with 
two thousand alumni, but it has among 
them five governors, three lieutenant-gov- 
ernors, two Cabinet officers, twenty-six 
federal and State judges, thirty-six other 
federal officers, fifteen civil service men, 
eighty army and navy officers, and five 
hundred and forty-seven professional men. 
When Willamette University had only 
about one hundred in its college depart- 
ment, the chief justices of the supreme 
courts of the three States of Oregon, Wash- 
ington, and Idaho were among its grad- 
uates, while two others of the supreme 
court judges had been among its students, 
and the Portland Oregonian said editorially 
that Willamette University had exerted a 
greater moral influence in Oregon than all 
other forces combined. The record of one 



64 THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 

is the record of all. It is only a question 
of the names and the number of men, the 
respective institution has given to enrich 
our public life. 

But more. The Christian ideals of this 
small college, founded and fostered as it 
has been chiefly by the church, have given 
a peculiar type of statesmanship. Bismarck 
is reported to have said, ''Such is the 
state of diplomacy in Europe that when 
I wish to deceive a man I tell him the 
exact truth." It was John Hay, whose 
Alma Mater commemorates him in a mag- 
nificent memorial building, who became 
the apostle of a new diplomacy based on 
truth and candor. It was this same John 
Hay who, in the spirit of American fair 
play, proposed and made eflFective the open- 
door policy in China, and it is noble souls 
like James W. Bashford, Wilson S. Lewis, 
G. Sherwood Eddy, and John R. Mott — 
men trained in our American colleges — 
who are shaping "the whisper to the 
throne" in China to-day, and who are 
guiding that mighty nation into a con- 



THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE ^5 

sciousness of power which is to lead it 
into an unparalleled field of usefulness. 

This noble Allegheny College, whose 
guests we are, has a marvelous honor roll. 
I have gone over the Alumni Record fre- 
quently only to be convinced that we 
could make several lists, each enrolling a 
half dozen alumni whose combined service 
would have abundantly paid the world for 
every dollar invested in this college. In- 
deed, would it be too much to say that 
such an honor crowns the lifework of 
single individuals like William McKinley 
and James M. Thoburn, and others per- 
haps equally worthy .^^ 

In the palace of the great Iron Chan- 
cellor, at Friedrichsruhe, in a room whose 
walls were decorated with the portraits 
of European sovereigns, there hung the 
pictures of George Bancroft, Ulysses S. 
Grant, George Washington, and Alexander 
Hamilton. This grew out of the fact 
that when Bismarck was a student at the 
University he became, as he tells us in 
his Reflections, a pantheist and well-nigh 



66 THE CHRISTIAX COLLEGE 

an atheist. John Lothrop Motley and a 
group of New England students exercised 
a powerful influence upon him at this 
time, and when in later years Motley 
became envoy of the United States at 
Vienna and London, and the historian 
of the Dutch Republic, he became the 
intimate friend of the great German chan- 
cellor. The world knows how Bismarck 
passed from an almost mediaeval devotion 
to monarchical and aristocratic forms of 
government to be an advocate of con- 
stitutional liberty; from a hatred of par- 
liamentary institutions and of the admis- 
sion of the people to power to be the 
advocate of a federated government with 
a broad, democratic representation. In 
fact, like Gladstone, he made a complete 
change in his political opinions during his 
progress from youth to full manhood. 
He broke with his old political associates. 
He became the greatest advocate of what 
he had formerly opposed. Andrew D. 
White, citing these facts, shows that chief 
among the forces contributing to this 



THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 67 

change was the influence of that group 
of respected Americans, and particularly 
the influence of the ideas of that great 
historian and diplomat, George Bancroft, 
then American minister to Germany. Mr. 
White estimates the influence of these 
Americans on Bismarck as the most po- 
tent of his whole life. With no legal or 
political power, by the sheer force of 
character, personality, and ideas, a group 
of very able and fascinating Americans 
contributed in a large degree to the making 
of the greatness of modern Germany. 
And will anyone doubt that if that in- 
fluence had persisted and had become even 
more potent after Bismarck's death, some 
phases of the present catastrophe might 
have been different.^ 

I always view with a thrill of pride 
that poem in stone called "The Boston 
Public Library." But more impressive than 
its great stacks of books, its marvelous 
array of magazine literature, and its won- 
derful mural art decorations, is the simple 
record in the vestibule of those thirty 



68 THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 

men whose names are carved in the arches 
of the columns: Charles Sumner and Wen- 
dell Phillips, William EUery Channing and 
Phillips Brooks, Agassiz and Asa Gray, 
Longfellow and Emerson, Webster and 
Story, Motley and Bancroft, Theodore 
Parker and Cotton Mather, Choate and 
Adams, Parkman and Prescott — thirty of 
them in all. Any five of them would have 
made Boston and New England great and 
world-renowned. But with only one or 
two exceptions, they are the product of 
the great New England colleges. They 
show what Harvard and Yale, Dartmouth 
and Williams, Amherst and Bowdoin meant 
to civilization, and in the main they were 
the developed children of the common 
people. And the spirit of social service 
persists to our day. Who can measure 
the magnitude of the service of William 
H. Taft and Dean Worcester to the new 
civilization which we are developing in 
the Philippines! 

This leads me to mention briefly what, 
on the occasion of the Thoburn Jubilee 



THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 69 

I ^ had the privilege of treating at length 
here at Allegheny College, namely, that 
the college has been the birthplace and 
the nursery of foreign missionary move- 
ments. We at that time recounted the 
story of the Yale Band of 1898, of the 
great Student Volunteer Movement which 
has now actually sent nearly five thousand 
men among all the nations of the world; 
of the Harvard Mission Band; of the Hay- 
stack Prayer Meeting and its wonderful 
results; of the fascinating story of Oberlin 
and its one thousand alumni devoted to 
some form of home or foreign missionary 
service. We showed that the college man 
has been the typical foreign missionary 
leader, because he, of all men, had the 
widest vision and the foremost grasp of 
the far-reaching world principles revealed 
in the Bible and embodied in the teachings 
of Jesus; because the attitude of mind and 
heart begotten by the college had been 
conducive to leadership; because he had 
been quick to recognize a sense of social 
obligation and to realize that he was 



70 THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 

blessed that he might be a blessing. We 
showed how the training of the college 
had fitted men for leadership by develop- 
ing the power to see things as they are 
and to do things as they ought to be done; 
by inspiring the statesmanship which 
formed policies commending themselves to 
the judgment of thinking men; and cul- 
tivating the ability to create that enthusi- 
asm which disposes large companies of 
men to follow the chief. We recounted 
how the college man had been the chief 
factor in shaping the Christian ideals which 
have conquered the heathen world, and 
pointed out that the long lists of mission- 
ary leaders when examined revealed the 
fact that ninety per cent of the missionary 
leadership of the world had been con- 
tributed by the Christian colleges. It 
appeared that these trained missionaries 
had promoted the reconstruction of laws 
and the reform of judicial procedure; had 
aided in the reconstruction and the ame- 
lioration of administrative methods; had 
elevated the standard of government serv- 



THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 71 

ice; had furthered proper international 
relations, and had made large and unique 
contributions to the world's store of knowl- 
edge. They had performed tasks requiring 
genuine scholarship such as the publication 
of hundreds of volumes, monumental con- 
tributions to lexicography and the reduc- 
tion of languages which existed only in 
confused spoken idioms to written forms. 
They had created many a literature, had 
made important contributions to compar- 
ative philology. This same college-trained 
missionary had proven himself an explorer 
and a geographer of the first rank, an 
archaeological discoverer, a student and 
pioneer in many fields of science, a physi- 
cian able to make medical studies of 
world-wide significance; while, above all, 
he had been a most important factor in 
international diplomacy and in political 
movements of world scope. The record 
of these achievements enlarges with every 
passing month. 

Look now in the home field. Take an 
illustration of this college man in social 



72 THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 

development and moral uplift. The Anti- 
Saloon League is doing a monumental work 
in the temperance reform. At the great 
National Convention at Columbus, Ohio, 
November, 1913, Howard Russell, its 
founder, an Oberlin graduate, told the 
story of the struggle of its earlier days. 
He said: "We started in 1893, just when 
the terrible financial panic began. At 
first it was hard going. We rented a low- 
priced house in northern Columbus and 
Mrs. Russell changed her routine and 
became herself the servant of the house. 
My first office was in my valise. Then we 
hired a dark back room upon an alley at 
three dollars a month. Making dates was 
expensive. A man had to be sent ahead 
and the clerk in the office sent out the 
literature. These and other necessary ex- 
penses, though small, caused us bitter hard 
times. One day before I left for my 
Sunday appointment I put my watch in 
pawn to get a little money for groceries 
for the family. At the end of thirty days 
I recovered the timepiece on payment of 



THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 73 

the principal and interest at the per annum 
rate of one hundred and twenty per cent. 
Once the children in the grammar school 
were told to bring a potted flower for 
Decoration Day exercises. My wife had 
the flower-pot but no dime to buy the 
flower for our little girl. She found a 
weed with a pretty blossom in the back- 
yard. She thought that better than none, 
so she trimmed the pot neatly and my 
daughter took this to school. Some of 
the children discovered it and laughed 
at it. The little girl was heartbroken, 
but when I came home I told her I was 
poor only because I was sacrificing for 
the many children who were barefooted 
and hungry because of the drink traffic. 
She bravely dried her tears and said, 
Tapa, then we will fight on together, even 
if it is hard sometimes.' But in the deeper 
darkness of the panic days the hardships 
of my loved ones led me almost to give 
up the struggle. I concluded, however, 
first to go back to Oberlin and confer 
with President Fairchild before I did it. 



74 THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 

I told him my difficulties and asked him 
if he thought I could be 'let off.' He 
asked me questions and then said, *Let 
us seek God's counsel.' We went into 
his private office. We knelt together. He 
prayed, and such a prayer! He told God 
the whole story. Then we were silent for 
a while. Then we rose; he looked into 
my eyes and said, 'Howard, my boy, we 
cannot let you off. God will not let you 
off; but I will double my subscription.' 
And after that God raised up financial 
relief. Metcalf of Elyria and the Roots 
and John Calvert held a serious confer- 
ence, and God's Spirit moved them to 
send our treasurer two checks for five 
hundred dollars each to save the day. 
Oberlin was always steadfast in prayer 
and in sacrifice, and soon it was Oberlin 
College which sent that vigorous young 
graduate, fresh from college, Wayne B. 
Wheeler, who has never heard any other 
call for his splendid talents than God's 
command to lead the conflict." How shall 
this nation sufficiently thank God for a 



THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 75 

president of Oberlin who knew how to 
pray and who knew how to hold men of 
mettle like Howard Russell and Wayne 
Wheeler to the task of overthrowing the 
infamous and impudent liquor traffic in 
this country. 

But when God's record books are opened 
similar stories will astonish the saints. 
How many hundreds of missionary de- 
cisions have been made, how many thou- 
sands of life purposes have been formed, 
how many noble consecrations have been 
consummated in just such prayer sessions 
between president or professor and student 
in our Christian colleges! Scores of us 
who have been professors know some of 
these things from personal experience. 

And go into the field of philanthropy. 
It was Cornell College that gave New 
York Edward T. Devine, the head of its 
School of Philanthropy, and Frank Persons, 
the head of its charity organizations. It 
was the colleges of the Middle West which 
gave Homer Folks to the New York Char- 
ities Organization, Wilbur F. Crafts to the 



76 THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 

International Reform Bureau, Josiah Strong 
and Walter Rauschenbusch to their honor- 
able work, and Shelby Harrison to the 
Sage Foundation. 

And what shall we more say, for time 
fails us to tell of the contributions of these 
colleges to the elevation of the spirit of 
our public life, to the thorough discipline 
and finer culture of our people, to the 
broadening of our national sympathies, and 
to the perpetuation of the ideas of democ- 
racy. It fails us, moreover, to show the 
immense contribution of these colleges to 
the elevation of womanhood. I think I 
could prove that a very large part of the 
forces which are bringing woman to her 
queenly position in our generation began 
with her admission to the colleges of the 
country about the middle of the last 
century. 

In our day colleges are acquiring beau- 
tiful landscapes, elegant buildings, costly 
equipments, great endowments, but there 
is some danger that we shall have an 
experience similar to that which has come 



THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 77 

to many a family when newly acquired 
wealth has enabled it to move out of the 
little old village or farm home into the 
elegant city mansion. Habits of frugality, 
simplicity, domestic fidelity, and piety 
have been abandoned until the house has 
been left unto them desolate of all that 
constitutes a real home. The spirit which 
made the home and the fortune departs 
before the sirocco of selfishness and sin. 
We rejoice in the increasing material equip- 
ment. We hail with joy the wisdom of 
adopting methods adapted to the new 
conditions of our wonderful age; but let 
the colleges beware! It is only the spirit 
that giveth life. Hence we close with a 
sincere wish that these colleges may keep 
so close to God, may remain so true to 
the high ideals which have inspired them 
in their earlier history that they may 
continue to give us men of sober minds, 
of close thought, of ample and critical 
knowledge, of scientific spirit, of high 
purpose, of wide vision, of devoted pa- 
triotism, of pure lives; men cheerful with- 



78 THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE 

out frivolity, courageous without rudeness; 
men who love their fellow men; men who 
are in love with everything which touches 
life with an upward tendency; and, above 
all, men with that spirituality which makes 
the essence and the relations of human 
life divine. 



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